The Half Decent Christmas Mix

December 17, 2007

Collected from the depths of the Internet (okay… a handful of acquaintances on it) a few years back, here is a mix that may not actually want to bash your head into a brick wall during the holiday season…

or maybe it is just to avoid that feeling you get when you walk into yet another store and hear yet another crappy version of Silent Night that makes you want to jab forks into your eyes and ears and spend the rest of the year wrapped in bandages.

The first track is really the theme for the whole mix. Stevie Wonder tells you all the wonderful things the Christmas means to him, and it sounds just dandy. But let’s be honest, Christmas is just as likely to be about bitterness, anger, disgust, and despair, and it certainly has a tendency to depress as much as it does to actually make one happy.

So we try to cover all the range of emotions here from the genuine overblown, over-packaged, and over-produced X-Mas (Mariah Carey), to the truly heartbreaking holiday (Prince), to Elvis (Elvis), to a little girl singing to Elvis (Michele Cody), to Elvis impersonators (El Vez). We’ll cover Santa, Satan, and Santas who are just plain evil (De La Soul). We’ve got the machine gun guitar (Alex Harvey), the drum machine boy (Beck), the requisite Ella Fitzgerald track, and enough hoping Christmas ska and reggae to please teenagers who have to sneak away for the next three weeks to smoke their pot.

And by the time you reach the last track, you’ll know that when we say “Feliz Navidad” we really do mean it from the bottom of our heart.